Friday, 7 December 2012

Visible Dreariness

Hi.

Are you ok?

I feel like I’ve been neglecting you. I
haven’t been up to much. Just a whistle stop tour from Paradise Lost to Omeros
and 5000 words that will never see the light of day again. A week’s worth of
angst printed, doubled-sided, to end up in a pile in a box in a cupboard with
the rest of my undergraduate work. With it, no more Waxwings and nothing much
of interest for you. For me, I walked the road from Cambuskenneth at night with
the threat of snow. The sky above Edinburgh burns at night. You can see the
orange stain from here; Grangemouth is just a smudge; the Hillfoots are a
necklace of streetlights; cars race down here and the path is treacherous
underfoot. There can be an even more treacherous beauty in pollution. Nothing quite compares to a clear
night: the moon out lamping stars. Play connect the dots. Orion’s belt. The
Plough. Polaris. Head back until your neck hurts. Dizzy. Not because of the
endless mystery of the night sky, just it’s cold and my inept circulation.
Geese heading to roost on the Forth after dark, cackle in the night. The moon is
never quite bright enough to lamp them.

It did eventually snow. I woke up and saw the geese going
the wrong way: as if they’d come up the Forth, found the carse in ermine and
thought better of it. The loch mostly iced up; variations on grey and white,
whilst a peachy drake Goosander bobs blissfully amidst the Mallards it tries to
mate with in spring. A floating duck has a kind of zen, the zen that comes with
not having to write essays and a timetable of eat, sleep, hybridise. I saw six
from the bus the other day, floating in the Forth.

This is the life of the almost finished student. The
apathy of a job mostly done, so let’s not try to think about it anymore. More
books to read, a meeting to attend. Birds are still there at the fringes of
life, they never leave. Wordsworth could wring a transcendence out of this. His
visionary dreariness. It’s a phrase I love but that turkey’s neck has been well
wrung by now. I’m counting days until I head home again, when the nature/life
balance becomes more correctly skewed towards nature.

And in lieu of having an actual bird photo to put here, this
is a sign at the university library, my new home.